Was the American Revolution really a revolution? 
Was George Washington a great general? 
Was the American victory a miracle or inevitable?  

Dr. Joseph Ellis explores these questions and more in his lecture on July 20, 2022, about "The Cause," complicating conventional narratives to present a richly nuanced vision of this foundational moment in American history. A landmark work of narrative history, "The Cause" challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.

Joseph Ellis is one of the nation’s leading scholars of American history. A professor of history, he has taught in the Leadership Studies program at Williams College, the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Ellis’s commentaries have been featured on CSPAN, CNN, and PBS’s Lehrer News Hour, and he has appeared in several documentaries on early America. The author of twelve books, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" and won the National Book Award for "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson." Joseph Ellis’s latest work is "The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773–1783."

The content and opinions expressed in this presentation are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

An Evening with Joseph Ellis (J. Harvie Wilkinson, Jr. Lecture 2022)

On May 5, 2023, author Craig S. Chapman spoke about the first overseas deployment of American troops, in which 4,000 colonists (including 400 from Virginia) served in the British Army on a disastrous expedition to the Caribbean.

In 1740 Great Britain mounted the largest overseas expedition in its history to that time. The goal was to seize control of Spain’s West Indies possessions during the so-called War of Jenkins’ Ear. Because of the large number of sailors and soldiers required, Britain resorted to enlisting recruits from its North American colonies to serve in the king’s army. The British launched joint land-sea attacks on Cartagena de Indias (modern day Colombia), Santiago de Cuba, and Panama, but failed in all three missions. Thirteen to fifteen thousand Britons and Americans perished on the expedition, as many as would die in the entire French and Indian War. As Capt. Lawrence Washington remarked, “War is horrid, in fact.”

Craig S. Chapman is the author of "Disaster on the Spanish Main: The Tragic British-American Expedition to the West Indies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear" and two other military histories, "Battle Hardened: An Infantry Officer’s Harrowing Journey from D-Day to VE Day" and "More Terrible Than Victory: North Carolina’s Bloody Bethel Regiment, 1861–65."

This lecture was sponsored by the Society of Colonial Wars in Virginia.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

“War is horrid, in fact”: Virginians in the West Indies Expedition, 1740–42

Eric Clapton&John Mayer - Broken Hearted

This series contains audio from lectures given in person or online at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture by renowned authors on historical topics. The content and opinions expressed by guest lecturers in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.To view a video of the lecture, visit VirginiaHistory.org/video. 

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture is owned and operated by the Virginia Historical Society — a private, non-profit organization. The historical society is the oldest cultural organization in Virginia, and one of the oldest and most distinguished history organizations in the nation. For use in its state history museum and its renowned research library, the historical society cares for a collection of nearly nine million items representing the ever-evolving story of Virginia.

An Evening with Joseph Ellis (J. Harvie Wilkinson, Jr. Lecture 2022)

Virginia Museum of History & Culture

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